… Democrats and Republicans argue less strenuously about whether states should permit “voluntary school prayer” (General Social Survey 2014) than about whether allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns in public increases homicide rates or instead decreases them…

… safety of deep geologic isolation of nuclear wastes, the health effects of the HPV vaccine for teenage girls; the deterrent impact of the death penalty, the efficacy of invasive forms of surveillance to combat terrorism…

… In the study, the subjects… were shown pictures and CVs of scientists, all of whom had been trained at and now held positions at prestigious universities and had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences… The subjects were then asked to indicate how strongly they disagreed or agreed that each one of them was indeed a scientific expert on a disputed societal risk… The positions of the scientists on these issues were manipulated, so that half the subjects believed that scientist held the “high risk” position and half the “low risk”… The direction and strength of the subjects’ assessment of the expertise of each scientist turned on out to be highly correlated with whether the position attributed to the scientist matched the one that was predominant among individuals sharing the subjects’ cultural out-looks…

… subjects highest in Numeracy more accurately construed complex empirical data on the effectiveness of gun control laws but only when the data, properly interpreted, supported the position congruent with their political outlooks…